The Shanghai Gesture Rating: Release Date: 31 August, 1999 Retail Price: $14.99 OUR Price: $13.99 You SAVE: $1.00! Cast: Gene Tierney Walter Huston Victor Mature Marcel Dalio Complete Cast (9 total)

The Shanghai Gesture Reviews

---

YOU DO NOT NEED TO SHOW SEX, TO SHOCK
This movie has been written about so often and so well, and in such detail, there is no need to re-hash all that here. The play from which it is taken is deadly dull and pretensious. It amazes me von Sternberg was able to transform it into stimulating adult entertainment.

Nevertheless, from my point of view, the movie ends as a demonstration of the betrayal and infamy and moral depravity of Anglo-colonials, not only in the Orient -- and not only Englishmen either -- but all over the world. At the time the movie was made, the notion of such a thing was absolutely scandalous, and that's why the show was hidden by clouds of hippocritical critic-babel, and touted as a kind of von Sternberg freak show of Asiatic, drug-soaked depravity. The Japanese hadn't thrown the English out of Asia yet, and English-speakers and readers lived pretty much in a land described by W. Somorset Maugham. Colonialism was far from dead, even in the cosmopolitan metropolis Shanghai; the first and greatest Open Trading City, where anything you could think of and pay for was available. It's interesting to recollect that Wallace Simpson, who married the King of England and became the Dutchess of Windsor, served her sexual apprenticeship in a Shanghai social club for batchelors, perhaps not too unlike this one of Madame Gin Sling's.

And, it is curious, particularly, that von Sternberg chose to introduce a theme of homoeroticism through the very big, dark handsome and masculine, Victor Mature. In a burnoose and fez and with smoldering sensuality in every un-blinking black-eyed look, he is/was a challenge to every "straight" man. Today's equivalent would be a muscle-bound actor naked, or in a thong. Interestingly enough, at about the same time, in THE MALTESE FALCON, the director does much he same thing, in the same way, with the introduction of a character called Joel Cairo, played by, of all people, Peter Lorre. In that film, the forbidden sin was of Syrian origin, had curly hair, wore a tux, smelled of Chypre and got bitch-slapped by Mary Astor. What is so remarkable is that the existence of Gay men as sexually secure and formidable, integral figures in a modern story, was a very dangerous thing to propose, let alone to show.

How far we have come in only about half a century. In SHANGHAI GESTURE, all the so-called vices are on parade, as characters and types in a gambling den (with rooms upstairs.) It's like an automated wax-works of Protestant sin. But, looking at those characters today, and that situation now in the age of legalized gambling -- and the rebirth of Shanghai -- we see nothing or nearly nothing out of the ordinary. Except, of course, the astonishing beauty of the very young Jean Tierny who, under von Sternberg's lens, writhes and pouts like a little kitten being teased just as she enters her first heat.


Where's the zero-star rating?
In my ongoing meander through the world of noir (and noir-ish) I thought I'd give this a chance. Yes, Gene Tierney is beautiful. End of story.
This story was watered down, so it goes, to get around the Hollywood censors - and nothing is left. There's not a character to care about (except maybe Dixie). Victor Mature is SO bad, it's amazing he had a career at all.

More Customer Reviews (11 total)

You like The Shanghai Gesture? Then You'll Love This Booty! Double Indemnity Laura The House on Telegraph Hill Where the Sidewalk Ends The Street with No Name Find more DVD's in: Classics Drama > By Theme > Melodrama Drama > Classics Drama > By Genre > Action & Adventure All Categories (10 total)